CVSA, Police Officers Prep for Roadcheck

This story appears in the May 25 print edition of Transport Topics.

For 72 continuous hours covering June 2-4, law enforcement officers throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico will conduct commercial vehicle inspections in the annual Roadcheck, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance announced.

On those three days, more than 1,000 checkpoints will be set up on roads and highways across North America. In addition, roving patrols of state and local officers will pull over commercial vehicles for inspection.

“Operate safely alongside passenger vehicles, or we will stop you,” CVSA said in a statement.

Now in its 22nd year, the event is sponsored by CVSA in conjunction with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and its counterparts in Canada and Mexico.

Besides driver certifications and vehicle safety inspections, CVSA said officers this year also will be checking whether truck owners have paid the Unified Carrier Registration fees, which were mandated in 2007 by the federal government.

The fees are a flash point within the trucking industry because some carriers have failed to pay them, which cuts into the UCR revenues sent to the states to pay for safety enforcement (click here for related story).

American Trucking Associations supports Roadcheck’s focus on safety and the new effort on UCR compliance, said ATA President Bill Graves.

“While UCR compliance is not directly related to safety during a road check, this funding mechanism provides resources to the states for commercial vehicle enforcement efforts,” Graves said.

“Our association wants all carriers to pay their fair share to provide funds for adequate safety enforcement,” he added.

About 10,000 federal, state and local inspectors in the three nations will take part in Roadcheck.

“The Roadcheck campaign highlights the important work that commercial vehicle inspectors perform every day to keep our roads safe and save lives,” Rose McMurray, FMCSA’s acting deputy administrator, said in the statement.

“The number and the severity of crashes each year involving large trucks and buses is declining. We must not lessen our resolve to work together to make our highways and roads safer for every traveler,” McMurray said.

The roadside inspections save lives and make highways safer, Stephen Campbell, CVSA’s executive director, said.

“We see great results because of the cooperation among a large group including industry, state and federal government agencies,” Campbell said.

During last year’s Roadcheck, some 68,000 truck and bus inspections were conducted in the three participating nations, with more than 52,000 of those checks consisting of North American Standard Level 1 inspections.

Level 1 inspections include driver licenses and medical examiner’s certificates, as well as such truck items as brakes, exhaust systems, steering mechanisms, coupling devices, tires and suspension.

Inspectors also will target seat-belt compliance among commercial drivers, CVSA said.

Prior to 2003, seat-belt safety was not something Roadcheck addressed primarily, John Hill, former head of FMCSA, told Transport Topics.

CVSA and ATA, along with the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, helped increase compliance, Hill said.

“All these groups came together and said, ‘Hey, we really need to improve the 48% compliance rate,’ which is what it was back in ’03, ’04,” Hill said.

According to FMCSA, today the seat-belt compliance rate by drivers and other occupants of medium- and heavy-duty commercial motor vehicles is 72%.

Roadcheck is a significant event, Hill said, because it allows the law enforcement community and the commercial vehicle industry to evaluate themselves.

“People who don’t want to be compliant with the safety regulations, they know when it’s best to run, when people aren’t around and you can find those avenues or those thoroughfares where you can evade some kind of inspection process,” Hill said.

Because Roadcheck lasts for three days, the event “gives us a snapshot for overall enforcement at what’s going on in the country and I think it’s healthy to do that periodically,” Hill said.